Friday, June 24th
I tried a small experiment today – video.
I’d been wondering what it would be like to film this trip. But committing to a words and photos is tough enough – video would demand a whole extra level of dedication and would remove me another step from the present.
But the pay off for this kind of investment in time and energy can be huge. Video is probably the most immersive and accurate way to document things. I’ve watched vlogs from people I don’t even like doing things I don’t particularly care about (e.g. Casey neistat), but there’s something about someone just documenting what they are doing which appeals in a very basic human way.
So I decided i’d record one day in full, just to see what it felt like. I wasn’t vlogging in the truest sense – narrating the scene, talking to the camera etc. Instead I just tried to document every single thing from getting out of my sleeping bag and opening my tent in the morning, to the reverse at night, to try and communicate exactly what a day cycle touring in the USA looks and feels like.
Two things spring to mind at the end of this day:
1. I’m excited to edit the footage and have an almost complete record of this day.
2. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to do this ever again.
Usually when I pick a camp spot somewhere that’s very scenic something goes wrong. Like in Korea when I camped on a small hill with a beautiful view of the coast of an uninhabited island, only to be woken up at 2am by a bunch of local fisherman preparing their nets for before they left at sunrise.
But camping a stones throw from Cass Lake on Norway Beach worked out just fine and I woke up with the same shade of golden sunlight which drew me into the area the night before.
One frustrating thing: i’ve lost the rubber end bit of one of my earphones. Anyone who has owned ears and/or headphones knows how annoying this is, especially when travelling. One good thing: after experimenting with various different positions and fixtures for the GoPro camera, none of which worked in a completely satisfying way, I found a solution staring me in the face – screw it directly on the fork. The bolts to hold panniers on my Surly forks are the same dimension as the GoPro screws, so with just one bracket I’ve got it firmly attached. I still don’t know what i’ll do with all the videos (150+ so far) but since it requires virtually no effort to turn it on every now and then, it seems worth sticking with.
I had around 20 miles to cover to Bemiji. I stayed on the route 2 still, which was a fairly charmless but functional way of heading West. I stopped at a gas station for coffee and it happened to have a flea market / car boot set up in the forecourt. An unusually collection of people selling an unusual collection of stuff. Though the last thing I need right now is more stuff, of any kind, I find it hard to resist having a look at things like this.
I’d already taken a bunch of videos by this point. Using my Fuji camera to take video is a bit cumbersome and when I tried to film a simple shot of coffee going into my coffee cup in the gas station the cup and coffee went straight on the floor and the cashier understandably gave me a funny look.
Bemiji seemed about the size of Grand Rapids. Another cute Northern town. I took Paul Bunyan Drive off the route two which led directly to the famous Paul & Babe statues from 1937. I think the first time I came across these two characters was when a similarly sized pair loom out of the dark snowy landscape in a shot early on in Fargo (though that particular sculpture was created just for the film). I’m still not 100% sure of their story and the folklore but it’s a classic piece of Americana which people seem drawn to – according to Kodak these are the second most photographed statues in America.
There’s definitely something special about their oddly proportioned bodies, and the way they just stand there so rigid yet Animated at the same time.
I took some photos then headed straight to the Cabin Coffee Shop where I holed up for almost three hours, sending off a few emails and sorting out photos, things i’d originally planned to do a day or two ago but couldn’t find time for in-between the fish fry and the hot tub.
It was the most gentrified coffee shop i’d been in for a while. I had a cappuccino and home made Oreo style cookie, then a Cuban pulled pork sandwich and some cold press coffee. I sat in the window so I could watch my bike, but really i’ve never worried about it too much since leaving New York. Aside from the Brooks saddle it doesn’t look that appealing and most people would probably fall right off if they tried to ride it away.
Eventually I left at around 2.30. I went back to the sculpture to try and get a better photo of myself in front of it since I have barely any of me so far, then stopped at a gift shop where I spent too much money on a a couple of small souvenirs for gifts and a few postcards.
The afternoon was weird. I felt a little bit sick. A combination of eating an entire share-size bag of Skittles within half an hour, the results of the Brexit vote the previous night (although I didn’t fully comprehend the implications of this it just made me feel unsettled), and the video documentation I was attempting which was started to make me feel very distanced from what I was doing. In some ways I just wanted the day to end so I could stop filming it. It was distracting to me from doing exactly what I was trying to film – me cycling.
I’d also got into the bad habit of counting down the miles. Maps.Me (my offline maps tool) will countdown the miles, if you’re following a plotted route and I find this leads to me checking my phone too much.
I was viewing the day as a bit of an experiment and decided I’d make it a short day, so as to not prolong these existential troubles I was having. I decided i’d aim for Itasca State Park. It was only about 25 miles away (meaning a short, 55-60 mile day, and a long day to Fargo the day after).
As I read a bit more about it it seemed like a good place to stop either way. It was Minnesota’s oldest state park and contained the headwaters, the origin, of the Mississippi. It would be a good place to spend possibly my final night in this state.
My cycling was slow. The roads were long, straight and windy like they had been for days. I was happy I had a destination and it was too far away.
Just on the edge of the park I stopped at The Junction. A strange little cafe / garage station shop in a large, barren parking lot. I bought an iced tea and some ice-cream. For $3.50 a woman filled a cone with as much ice cream as the laws of physics would permit. I ate it outside, the mint choc chip dripped on my shirt. I felt like a mess of sweat and sugar.
The park entrance was just a mile or two away, and inside, on winding, beautifully tree lined roads which looked like Oregon, I found the entrance to the camp site. $23. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Since i’d got away without paying for accommodation for a while, and it actually seems like a great park, I didn’t begrudge paying this too much. The guy told me it had showers, and even wifi, but i’d had enough of that today already.
I quickly put my tent up on a sad area of grassland where the cyclists usually get put, and cycled another couple of miles on a bike trail to the headwater. I came into a clearing and there was a marker and a guy with his back to me, he had his hands folded behind his back and seemed in deep thought with the view of this rivers beginning.
There was something humbling about this particular spot. The evening light and the quiet but also the simple wooden monolith marker, which read in bright yellow carved letters:
HERE 1475FT
ABOVE
THE OCEAN
THE MIGHTY
MISSISSIPPI
BEGINS
TO FLOW
ON ITS
WINDING WAY
2552 MILES
TO THE
GULF OF
MEXICO
I took some stepping stones over the water and back.
I headed back towards the camp but stopped at the swimming beach with about 20 minutes of sunlight left. I quickly took my shirt and shorts off and edged out into the cold lake water and plunged briefly underneath. Once I adjusted to the temperature I floated a while, a duck and five ducklings bobbed on the water nearby.
Back on the beach I dried off and watched the sun dissappear on the horizon. Now it was a pink glow behind clouds and trees. This all probably reads like horribly cliched garbage but having been in a slightly removed state of mind all day, watching the sunset in the park I began to feel more integrated with the environment I was in and started to enter a more reflective, contented state.
No matter how I tried to document what I was doing it would inevitably become part of my past. Trying to capture everything was ultimately a futile exercise, and maybe just served as a distraction from the repetitive and at times tedious nature of solo cycling. But at the same time I enjoyed it and needed projects like this each day to keep me going.
I was thinking about beginnings and endings. The river – how it was so big and went so far but started from something small enough for children to paddle in.
There’s a prolific Japanese photographer called Nobuyoshi Araki. I remember watching a photography documentary in which he said something which stuck with me. He said he felt he was able to capture someones past, present, and future all in one photo, this was in particular reference to a photo of his wife sleeping in a boat on their honeymoon. And I felt there was something in this moment, a piece in time more or less squarely in the middle of my trip, where I was experiencing all three tenses at once.
Map
